When Ari tried to bring you up, to ask if she could take me to the gynecologist, to be sure everything was okay, I stopped her. “The pregnancy test must’ve been wrong.” I said. She looked at me like she didn’t believe me; she was my sister, she knew what my period was usually like, how this time I’d bled through my pajama pants, through the overnight maxi pads she’d gotten for me. But she closed her mouth and never asked again. I wonder, now, if your grandma had still been alive, if she’d have made me talk more. Asked more questions. If I would’ve felt comfortable telling her in a way I didn’t with your grandpa. Regardless, my body did what it was supposed to in that situation. After ten days, I’d stopped cramping, stopped bleeding. I didn’t talk about you for six months. Until I had to. Until I thought I’d crumble to pieces if I didn’t.
While Ari and I were inside the house, cocooning ourselves in blankets, our father put on his winter coat, took his chain saw and his goggles, and cut down the oak, tree house and all.
He didn’t buy any more dura logs all winter.
19
The next day Emily decided to call in sick.
“Are you sure?” Ezra asked. “Do you really want to sit here all day? You can do some good at work, at least. Your kids need you.”
Emily shook her head. “I wouldn’t be able to focus,” she said, pulling the blanket up to her chin. She was still physically shaken from the day before—there was so much blood, so much cramping—and she was emotionally shaken, too. All she could think about was the fact that mixed in with that blood was the beginning of a baby. At some point she had wrapped those cells up in toilet paper or flushed them down the toilet. Or maybe she hadn’t yet. What if she hadn’t yet? She wanted to do that here, at home, not in the office.
Ezra was quiet for a moment. “I’m going in,” he said. “I need to distract myself. I need to do something. Fix something. Someone.”
Emily had assumed he’d want to stay home, too. That they’d be together. That they’d mourn this lost pregnancy the way she never did the last one. That together they’d heal and grow even stronger than they had been. She wanted him with her, to take care of her like he always did when she wasn’t feeling well, but she didn’t want to ask—if this was what he needed to do to make himself feel better, she wasn’t going to stop him. She didn’t want to be alone all day either, though. “I’ll call Ari,” she said. Just like last time. Ari was her rock. Ari had always been her rock.
The night before, Ezra had sent an email to everyone in their family telling them what happened. And then they all had called, and Ezra had spoken to them for her. Repeated the story over and over. Explained where and when and how. All the details that people want to know because they don’t know what else to say. He’d done what she needed him to do. Now she would do what he needed her to do, even though it hurt to do it. He does this, she reminded herself, this is how he copes with things he can’t handle. For the first time in their relationship, she wished he were different.
After Ezra left for work, Emily asked Ari to come over, and then pulled her dog-eared copy of The Red Tent from the drawer in her nightstand. It had been traveling with her for years, from nightstand to nightstand. As the book she had read to her mother in the months before she died, it felt like the last thread attaching her to her mom. Emily’d ended up finishing the last chapters on her own, the week after her mother’s funeral. But somehow there was still comfort in the book, comfort in how it connected her to her mother, in how it connected her to a time when her mother was alive, when the pressure of her hand on Emily’s arm meant so much.
Emily read, lost in another world, not thinking about her own, until Ari arrived and let herself in.
“Em?” she called.
“In here,” Emily said. She folded down the page she was on and put the book on the bed next to her as Ari walked into the room. When the two sisters saw each other, their eyes filled with tears.
Ari slipped off her jacket and shoes and climbed into the bed next to Emily, both of them on their backs, looking up at the ceiling. Ari slid her fingers into Emily’s, and the sisters held hands, the way they had each night for a week after their mom had died, not letting go until they’d both fallen asleep and their hands unclasped in their dreams.
“You’re okay,” Ari said. Not a question, a statement.
“I feel like this is my punishment,” Emily whispered, the thought that kept circling round and round in her mind. “For what happened in college.”